In 1800, with the expansion of music performances in scale, to better keep performers consistent on beat, conductors began to use batons by which performances gain great success and historical affirmation. In 1816, J. N. Maelzel, a German renowned machinist, made the first modern clockwork metronome on the basis of the idea of D. N. Winkel, a Dutch inventor, and was granted with the patent right. With the advance of science and technology, electronic metronomes arise recently.
However, such metronomes have a common disadvantage that they will continuously sound “Da-Da-Da” when in use. There has been research done by psychologists which explains that in this case, the brain of a person will generate a counterforce naturally such that the person will generate illusion and can not even hear the sound of a metronome, thereby causing interference to users. Meanwhile, as the users are required to follow the swing of a pendulum bob side to side and the flicker of the indicator of an electronic metronome with their eyes, the harmony of their performances will be often influenced. Music is a body language, and the metronome does not serve any function at all during the actual teaching process. A teacher in the actual teaching process accurately controls the rhythm by beating with his/her hands to realize the teaching objectives, and absolutely no teachers will teach particularly beginners by using a metronome. Apparently, no sound metronome can realize this. Moreover, in the case that a sound metronome is used during a performance, the slower the beat points are, the harder for the students to accurately represent the rhythm relations by body movements because it is more likely to confuse each note in each beat in the mind. The students can achieve a simulation effect only when feeling the rhythm by listening even through the teacher himself plays those easy to make mistakes for students. Simulation effect means that an approximate speed and rough feeling of a note will be left in the mind of a student after listening to the performance of a teacher, and this student will take this speed and feeling as a reference in the subsequent practices. This will bring a hidden risk of learning to play a song quicker at easy parts but slower at difficult parts. A sound metronome serves as a tool to check the students and performers. Even through a sound metronome is used in some practices, the students are greatly influenced as they need to always pay attention to and predict the time when the sound “Da-Da-Da” occurs, and are also unable to focus due to the interferential sound. As a result, they can not follow the rhythm accurately in the practices, either a little bit slow or fast. In this way, it is difficult for students to effectively make a progress and master the rule of rhythm. This is so-called simulation effect. Students may really realize high-efficiency and accurately find the rhythm relation depending on long-term slow practices. It is difficult to correct some places that do not feel right, because the wrong rhythm of this song has been already formed in the mind of a student and his/her body movement will be controlled by the wrong rhythm. Therefore, a sound metronome absolutely can not realize the teaching objectives. An existing metronome forms rhythm by means of sound, so the learners have to master the rhythm relation in a song by predicting a time interval of the sound arrival in their mind. As a result, the learners can not focus on learning, and the sound seriously influences the capacities of the learners for thinking. In this way, the learners are unable to focus on learning and to feel the rhythm well. Meanwhile, for students who just begin to learn to read the notes and try to play a song, a metronome provides them nothing but heavy interference. Unlike a baton, a metronome, the beating time of which depends on sound, has no any rhythm conducting function and is thus meaningless to particularly beginners. For a beginner, inappropriately using a metronome will restrict his/her imaginations.
It is considered by psychologists in the music sector that, it is bad for skill learning after long-time or long-term inappropriate use of metronomes, and more seriously, a user may even become a slave of metronomes like a robot.